The centrist is an elusive and unpredictable species. It is prone to darting out of press conferences before the Q&A starts. When backed into a corner by reporters, the centrist is known to give vague, uncomfortable answers, eye flitting about looking for escape routes. Our Brian Beutler encountered a female from the rare subspecies of Senate centrists today on Capitol Hill, and she exhibited many of the behavior patterns of her kind, especially when pressed on health care reform.

In an interview with TPMDC, former DNC chairman Howard Dean draws a bright line between voting against a public option and filibustering it:

Even though I disagree with him, Joe Lieberman is well within his right to vote against a public option. [But] no one has the right to oppose the leader. That isn’t fair.

Read the rest of the Dean interview here.

A lot of folks fondly reminiscing today about where they were and what they were doing one year ago. One year seems a bit premature for nostalgia, and my reaction to it was dismissive initially. Some of the nostalgia seems like a salve for the disappointments of the last year or for the expected poor showing by Democrats tonight. (But I suppose it’s not unusual for our nostalgia to say more about us in the present than it does about the past.) Then I watched this outtake from the HBO documentary on Obama debuting tonight and suddenly a year felt like a very long time, and the ’08 campaign like a quaint and simple time. Which I guess means I succumbed to the nostalgia, too, albeit unwillingly.